The United States and France

The world’s great and new-born admiration of France and of the French people is largely due to the manner in which, when the war came, her painters, sculptors, actors, playwrights, men of letters, and even men of pleasure, met the call—and have continued to meet it—by substituting bravery for sensitiveness, duty for emotion, and honor for mere love of pleasure. In the ranks of her literary men there are few more conspicuous figures than that of Marcel Prévost, for many years the president of the Society of Men of Letters, for many years, too, an officer in the Legion of Honor, and an Official in The Immortals. The fruit of Prévost’s genius has always been fragile, delicate, sensitive, analytical. Artistry and delicacy of intuition have been the sole aims of his published writings; never power, never strength. But, ever since the war began, Prévost, the artist, has been submerged, and in place of that fine figure has arisen that of Prévost, the soldier. In the following essay, written at the request of Vanity Fair, the author of “Lettres de Femmes” shows admirably why the future of America is indissolubly linked with the future of France.

*I have been asked to address a few words to the readers of Vanity Fair, and although nothing could give me greater pleasure, I regret my inability at the moment to write at any great length, for I have but little leisure. Since the beginning of the war, I have served continuously as an officer of artillery, part of the time in the intrenched camp about Paris, part of the time on observation and inspection duty at the front. For this reason I trust the brevity of my remarks may be forgiven. I shall endeavor, in extenuation, to confine myself to topics of importance.

When the war came, I never for a moment doubted that one of its effects would be to strengthen the ties already binding France to the United States. I knew my own country well enough to feel certain that the mobilization of its armies would disclose qualities of French character which would appeal more to Americans than those they would have been more likely to observe in times of peace. You dear Americans! How little you appreciated the real soul of France,—even those of you who spent a great portion of your lives among us. Now, at last, an end shall come to that mythical, legendary France of yours,—France, the corrupt, France, the degenerate, France, incapable of firmness, France, unequal to sustained effort! For the past fifteen months we have blocked the advance of our foe. Not one of our Allies questions the fact that the greatest effort of all was put forth by us,—that the decisive blow which broke the impetus of the German onrush and balked the German plan was struck by France.

And, furthermore, if you would convince yourselves, come back here now and look at Paris; come back and gaze upon all of France—you who knew Paris in these by-gone days,—days of luxurious and idle peace—and tell me if Paris and France are not now a hundredfold fairer than ever as they stand erect in the throes of the grim struggle they sustain! Your compatriot, Mrs. Edith Wharton, has recently written of these new conditions. No American who has seen these things as she has seen them can fail to endorse her every word.

Thus, thanks to the war, Americans have come to know France better than they knew her before, and as a result, to love her more. My fellow Academician, M. Brieux, who has lately been lecturing in America, told me how his words were greeted from day to day, from week to week, with an ever increasing warmth and cordiality. That was because from day to day, from week to week, the hearts of the people of our two countries have been drawing closer and closer to one another. This, indeed, is a worthy compensation for the test we are enduring, for it is extremely important that, in the future, the United States shall have a more just and sound estimate of France than her people have held in the past. I am fully convinced that certain cartoons and other libels against France (some of which I have seen myself in certain American newspapers) will no longer find a place in your independent press. As to those of your newspapers which are subsidized or conducted by our enemies, if they tell you again that the French of the Twentieth Century shrink from a career of arms, preferring a sybaritic pacifism, you may reply with a slogan of two words—two names of rivers—“The Marne” and “The Yser.” I even hope that, by the end of the war, you shall be able to add “The Rhine.” And if those same journals speak of French flippancy, of French degeneracy,—make inquiries of your own fellow countrymen (and you will find many) who have visited both Paris and Berlin in these strenuous times. These will tell you which of the two capitals has withstood the long and wearing strain with the fullest calm, the greatest dignity, and the least panic. Thanks to the war, the French ideal has outlined itself sharply and clearly to the American vision. Let us consider, on the other hand, what change the war may have made upon the French mind in its ideal of America?

My dear friends of America, we are no more infallible than you. There is no people who may boast that it knows, intimately or thoroughly, another people. The typical American of our thoughts was probably as different from the real American as the real Frenchman is different from your popular conception of a Frenchman. Yet I can assure you that however untrue to life our idea of an American may have seemed to you, it was nevertheless to us a type we loved and admired. To the average French mind an American woman is a tall, handsome creature, ostentatious, charitable, who likes to live in foreign hotels and to see many things without wasting time over any of them. An American man is a sturdy, well-dressed individual, equally charitable and ostentatious, who transacts a prodigious amount of business, and only stops working long enough to sleep. Why do you suppose these two strange personifications, so dramatically opposite to his true ideal, should appeal so strongly to the average Frenchman? Probably because the average Frenchman is neither tall of stature nor ostentatious; he cares more for his hearth than for all travel, and he jealously reserves a certain number of his waking hours for social and neighborly intercourse, even if this cuts into his income. Yet, above all this, our average Frenchman—in the same degree as the more cultivated and better informed among us—feels instinctively that the Americans and the French agree tacitly upon one particular political and human ideal; they both have the same conception of justice and the same respect for liberty. Our people feel that the French Revolution was sister to the American Revolution, and they realize that all the differences of customs, of daily life, even of language, are as nothing beside this wonderful community of ideals.

That is what we thought of the Americans before the war. And now, has the upheaval modified the Frenchman’s view? Probably not, in the sense that we are just as much convinced that our ideals of justice and liberty, to be respected and defended at any cost, are still those of the American people, considered as a whole. But our impression certainly has been modified in some respects. Events have disclosed to us one thing of which we were wholly unaware—even you yourselves may not fully have suspected it. This thing is that the whole of the American people is not a unit in its estimate of the Great Ideal. It is apparent that a considerable minority of your people, on the contrary, worship the opposite fetich—that of Treitschke and Bernhardi—the consideration that Might is supreme, even above liberty and justice.

Let us confess our ingenuousness. Let us admit that the existence of this condition among you has, in a sense, stunned us. For, so many times indeed, in standard works on the United States, in books written by travelers from Europe, and even by Americans themselves, we had read that America was one vast, all-powerful, irresistible melting pot, wherein all races were fused into one homogeneous nationality.

Well, the illustrious analysts were all wrong. There is one race willing to mix with the American fibre without however allowing itself to become assimilated by it. A German who becomes an American, is after all but an American body, stuffed with a German—a coat of American cloth lined with German material. Doubtless the lining is well fastened to the coat and is a part of it, but the owner of the garment seems to care fully as much for the lining as he does for the outer cloth.

However, in spite of our shortcomings, we Frenchmen are an intelligent people, and we have been quick to grasp your situation. We very soon became thoroughly aware of those elements in your home politics which affected and embarrassed your foreign relations. And we are none the less grateful to the great majority of traditional Americans (the Americans of the line of Washington) for all their good will and for the powerful aid they have given us. We know (and your compatriots who are still in Paris do not hesitate to assure us of it) that the true Americans would be quite eager to do a good deal more, if they only had a free hand.

After all, therefore, the two nations are just as much of the same mind as they were in the heroic days of the two great Revolutions. That is what counts just now. The assistance which America has rendered us—hampered though it may have been—will contribute greatly to our eventual success. And our victory, dear American friends, IS AS IMPORTANT FOR YOU AS IT IS FOR US. Aye, fully as important. For those nations which are not actually in the great conflict cannot ignore the struggle. Their fate is being decided along with that of the belligerents. To-day there are but two great groups in this world. One believes that Might is supreme over Right—the other contends that Justice must prevail against brutal force. All neutral nations either by temperament or by education belong to one of these two groups. Their ideals shall prevail or fall in just such a measure as shall be reaped by the belligerent powers, and their whole future history shall be affected by this result.

Therefore in France we are convinced that the United States belongs to the world group which favors Right over Might. Should France and England be overcome in the present struggle, an American minority, that minority which favors Might over Right, would no doubt properly consider itself victorious—but the national ideal of Americans would nevertheless be overthrown and by this would be accomplished the moral defeat of the real United States—of the nation of George Washington.

Dear friends of America—the war, far more so than peace, has enlightened us concerning you and has enlightened you concerning us. It has taught each one of us things we did not know before—things we had even perhaps failed to suspect. In addition to increasing our mutual esteem, it has welded ties which even time can never relax or release. Already now, every clear-visioned man in France and in America is aware that the destinies of our two peoples are bound by this huge struggle to an identical fate, and that the real American nation shall have true cause to rejoice on the day that France and her Allies shall triumph.

It is a happy chance perhaps which enables Vanity Fair to print, in connection with the above article by Marcel Prévost, an author in the ranks of France, a singularly timely and notable lithograph by Baron Charles Huard, an artist in the ranks of France. Baron Huard has recently arrived in America, on leave from the front, for a brief stay in New York, with his American wife. The lithograph shown on the opposite page is the first of a fine series which he made in the war zone. Vanity Fair will print others of the same series from time to time. Huard is perhaps best known as the illustrator of the definitive edition of the works of Honoré de Balzac.